Gas production assets owners typically have long range development plans to expand each of their gas wellpads incrementally, either for replacement of depleting production and/or for growth of production targets. Regardless of the differences of gas wellpad expansion strategy between asset owners, each owner will have similar long-term expansion strategy for each asset location. Due to original wellpad planning, fiscal financial governance, operations learnings and other owner-specific requirements, each owner's gas wellpad expansion approach typically evolve little in project charter, engineering scope and construction activities. A four-well gas pad expansion is common for many owners, and is considered a relatively small project scope.
The prevailing industry engineering and construction strategy for gas wellpad expansion has been largely to perform all-field fabrication and construction. This is often executed with multiple construction crew mobilizations. The field construction approach is taken largely due to the perception that it is more cost effective to field as-built/design and construct the surface facilities.
The multiple crew mobilizations are generally driven by an owner's desire for earliest start of flowback production between drilling completions of each well. Because historical Pad-On-Production (POP) metrics, for typical 4-wells surface facilities pad expansion full construction, can range up to about 35 days, many owners will opt to mobilize multiple times between completions with perception that flowback production will offset additional construction mobilization cost. Multiple construction mobilization can increase crew exposure to simultaneous-operations (sim-ops) safety risks.
Therefore, there is a need for a gas wellpad expansion system that is not subject to one or more limitations of the prior art.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.